Low-frequency Neural Activity Reflects Rule-based Chunking during Speech Listening

摘要: Abstract Cortical activity tracks the rhythms of phrases and sentences during speech comprehension, which has been taken as strong evidence that brain groups words into multi-word chunks. It prominently argued, in contrast, tracking phenomenon could be explained neural word properties. Here we distinguish these two hypotheses based on novel tasks dissociate properties from chunk structure a sequence. Two separately require listeners to group semantically similar or dissimilar We demonstrate actively task-related chunks rather than passively reflecting Furthermore, without an explicit ‘chunk processing task,’ barely defined by semantic similarity - but continues robustly track syntactically well-formed meaningful sentences. These results suggest cortical constructed either long-term syntactic rules temporary rules. The individual are likely contribute only minor way, contrary recent claims.